Al Jazeera News, Birzeit :National songs echoed throughout the West Bank’s Birzeit University campus as students met during a demonstration on December 21 in solidarity with the students and faculty members detained by Israel. The music abruptly stopped, and a young man with a microphone cried out to observers: “We come to you today, united in the name of Palestine, to defy Israel’s strategy of arresting us, which it is enforcing without discrimination, regardless of political affiliation.”About 90 students and two faculty members at University have been arrested in the past few months amid an Israeli crackdown. On Monday, Israeli occupation forces raided the university campus and destroyed the offices of the students blocs, according to a post on the university’s facebook page.The arrests have taken place amid an escalation in violence in the West Bank and Jerusalem since last October. An outbreak of mass demonstrations took place across Israel and the occupied territories by Palestinians in protest at Israeli raids into the al-Aqsa Mosque compound and the continued settlement expansion. In 2015, Israeli soldiers or settlers shot and killed 179 Palestinians, including unarmed protesters, bystanders and alleged attackers.Since October 1, lone Palestinian assailants have killed 23 Israelis, including soldiers and civilians. Israel has also used the developments in the past several months to impose severe restrictions on Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem.Although some students were arrested during confrontations, in recent weeks many have also been arrested at checkpoints or during police raids carried out in the middle of the night. Israel is fixating on arresting politically active students as a form of breaking this revolutionary thought and reminding them that any activity will be met with a form of suppression such as arrests. “[Israeli forces] are specifically targeting students because we are the ones who are able to reach different sections of Palestinian society,” said Amir, who requested that his full name not be used for fear of arrest.According to Amir, the “main aim of these tactics is to break us, break our will, and reinforce this internalisation that no matter what we do, they will creep up on us and lock us up, because they have the power to do so”.Birzeit University has long been a hotbed of political activity, and this has held true during the current unrest. Two of its best known alumni are leading Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti, who serves a life sentence in Israeli jail, and hunger striker Khader Adnan. Students have organised actions and seminars, in defiance of what they say is Israeli aggression and settler-colonialism, coordinated transportation to clash points between Palestinians and Israeli forces, and distributed brochures on how to deal with Israeli dispersal tactics. Activists at Birzeit believe that the wave of arrests is part of an Israeli strategy to suppress this mobilisation. “Everything happening is being done by the youth, and it’s not being controlled by factions. Instead, it’s a collective national endeavour,” said Sondos Hamad, the coordinator of the Right to Education Campaign, that aims to raise awareness of the obstacles facing Palestinian students, at Birzeit university.”Israel is fixating on arresting politically active students as a form of breaking this revolutionary thought and reminding them that any activity will be met with a form of suppression such as arrests.”In early October Abdul Latif abu-Hijleh, the acting president of Birzeit University, called for the release of students. “Israel is responsible for the well being of the students who are demonstrating peacefully against the occupation,” abu-Hijleh told Al Jazeera, adding that both human rights organisations as well the international community should take action against Israeli tactics impeding the right to education for Palestinian students.
